Energy harvesting in an OSTBC based amplify-and-forward MIMO relay system

Abstract

This paper investigates performance limits of a two-hop multi-antenna amplify-and-forward (AF) relay system in the presence of a multi-antenna energy harvesting receiver. The source and relay nodes of the two-hop AF system employ orthogonal space-time block codes for data transmission. We derive joint optimal source and relay precoders to achieve different tradeoffs between the energy transfer capability and the information rate, which are characterized by the boundary of the so-called rate-energy (R-E) region. Numerical results demonstrate the effect of different parameters on the boundary of the R-E region.